There are three different texts titled The Word of the Lord used by different Mormon splinter groups. One was written by Otto Fetting between 1927-1933. Another was written by William Draves starting in 1933. However, I could find next to nothing online about about the text written by Harry Edgar Baker between 1916 to 1918. Wikipedia mentions the other two books sharing this title, but not this earlier one.
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As with most anthologies, I liked some stories more than others. Your own personal tastes will likely differ from my own. For example, I’m personally not a fan of gross-out stories. I think stories that trigger disgust rather than fear shouldn’t even be considered horror, but rather be their own genre.
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Most of these stories are narrated by male characters, most involve bickering couples with relationship issues, and many of them involve characters seeing things that disappear.
“Just Another Horror Story” is a bit meta, as you’d expect from the title. It has a nice, unsettling atmosphere and is left unresolved at the end in a good way.
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When it comes to errors in human judgment, we tend to focus on bias, but noise is also a cause of error. Bias is the average of errors committed by a group. You need to know the right answer to know what the bias is. Bias is systemic and predictable. Noise, on the other hand, is variable amongst a group of judgements. You can tell there’s noise even if you don’t know the right answer. It’s unpredictable and not easily explained.
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Harlan Ellison is considered one of science fiction’s grand masters and I’ve heard praise for the title story in this collection, so I decided to give it a try.
“I Have No Mouth & I Must Scream” doesn’t have much of a plot. Basically, four men and one woman are being tortured by an artificial intelligence the whole time. The woman has sex with all the men even though they beat her and ignore her cries.
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When we first meet Cassiopeia, she lives in a small, repressive Catholic town in Mexico in 1927. She’s a Cinderella figure scrubbing floors and doing other household work at her cousin’s command. She also has to put up with an abusive grandfather. Her father has died and her mother is in the same position she’s in.
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The Black Vampyre was written in response to Polidori’s Vampyre. The edition I read contained a fascinating introduction which provided context for the story and numerous footnotes which explain the now-obscure references in the story.
The Black Vampyre was written anonymously, attributed to one Uriah Derick D’Arcy (this is an anagram of Richard Varick Dey, who may have been the actual author). Like Polidori, the author quotes lines about vampires from Byron’s “The Giaour” which compared Greece being subject to the Ottoman Empire to slavery. D’Arcy takes up this theme, applying it to African slaves in America.
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The world is better today because of the Enlightenment, yet people attack reason, science, humanism, and progress when these things should be celebrated.
One of the bits of wisdom from the Scientific Revolution is that misfortune is no one’s fault. Bad things sometimes happen for no reason other than the universe is indifferent to human suffering. There’s no point looking around for someone to blame when an earthquake happens. Entropy ensures there’s more ways for things to go wrong than for things to go right.
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“If there’s no word for it, how do you think about it?”
Twenty years after an invasion of the solar system, poet Rydra Wong (famous throughout the five explored galaxies) is called upon to help decode Babel-17, a language that has something to do with the invasion. Rydra is only 26 and in addition to being a famous poet, is also an expert in both human and extraterrestrial languages, to the extent she can even read people’s minds simply by observing their body language. There are nine space-faring species, some on each side of the war, but language barriers keep them from reality knowing each other even if they’re allied.
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In this alternate version of 1962, Roosevelt is assassinated during his first year in office which leads to the Japanese and Germans winning World War II. Germany and Japan divide the United States between them with the western US belonging to Japan and the eastern US belonging to Germany. While the Rocky Mountain states belong to Japan, they’re considered inconsequential and generally left to themselves. (Italy has a small empire in the Middle East, but generally didn’t benefit much from their alliance with Germany.)
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Mania Delight 